Salt crusted the gaps between the bridge's ancient stones, pale as bone against the dark granite. The Salt Bridge spanned a ravine so narrow and deep that no bottom could be seen, only a faint gleam of moving water far below and the faint, sour tang of mineral decay drifting upward. Maren had counted thirty-two steps from the southern abutment to the place where the road widened again. She had counted them twice, because counting kept her hands steady and her mind from straying toward the council chamber she had left behind in Hollowfen.
She did not want to think about Hollowfen. Not yet. Not while the sky still held the bruised violet of late dusk and her boots still carried the smell of woodsmoke and tallow.
Thessaly walked ahead of her, her staff striking the stones with a rhythm that was not quite regular. The witch of the marshes moved like someone who had long since made peace with being unwelcome everywhere, her patched cloak shedding bits of moss at every step. Behind Maren, Rowan Vael brought up the rear, his hand resting on the pommel of his sword with the unconscious ease of a man who had been trained to expect ambushes in civilized places. He had not spoken since they had left the last waypost.
Kael Ashford walked beside Rowan, his dark coat immaculate despite the dust of the road, his smile never quite fading from his lips. He spoke of inconsequential things: the weather, the price of salt in the southern markets, the curious quality of light in this part of the kingdom. His voice was warm and easy, and Maren had learned over three days of travel to mistrust every honeyed syllable that left his mouth.
The bridge's parapet had crumbled away on the eastern side, leaving a jagged line of broken stone against the sky. The western parapet still stood, though weeds had split its mortar and a single twisted tree had rooted in the crack between two blocks, its branches reaching out over the void like the fingers of a drowning hand. Maren felt the wind change as they reached the bridge's midpoint. It came from the ravine now, colder and carrying a faint, wet-rot scent that reminded her of cellars and old fevers.
Thessaly stopped.
The staff did not strike the stone a second time. It hung in the air, trembling faintly, and Thessaly's head tilted as though listening to a sound beneath the range of hearing.
"Quiet," she said.
The word cut through Kael's idle chatter. Kael's smile remained, but it changed. It went still the way a pond goes still before a stone breaks it.
"What is it?" Rowan asked, his hand closing around the pommel.
Thessaly did not answer immediately. She set the butt of her staff against the stone and let her weight settle onto it. Her eyes, pale and heavy-lidded, scanned the broken parapet, the twisted tree, the shadows pooling beneath the bridge's intact arch.
"Something remembers this place," she said. "Something that feeds on crossings."
Maren's pulse quickened. She looked at Rowan, then at Kael, then back at Thessaly. "Wraiths?"
"Or the memory of them." Thessaly's voice carried the flat certainty of someone stating the weather. "The bridge was built over something. A plague pit, perhaps. Or a place where travelers were left to die."
"Charming," Kael murmured. His hand drifted toward the hilt of the slender blade at his hip. "Should we turn back?"
"We cannot." Thessaly shook her head. "The southern road is watched. I told you that before we left the waypost."
"You told us many things." Kael's tone remained pleasant. "Some of them even consistent."
The first shape peeled itself from the shadow beneath the intact arch.
It had no face. Maren saw that first, and the absence was worse than any horror of feature. The shape was roughly the size and outline of a tall man, but its edges bled into the surrounding darkness as though it were only half committed to being present. It moved with a hitching, broken gait, as though it had forgotten how legs were supposed to work. The air around it went cold enough to sting Maren's nostrils, and she tasted copper on the back of her tongue.
Then there were more of them. Three. Five. Seven.
They came from beneath the bridge, from behind the parapet, from the cracks between the stones where shadow pooled thickest. They did not speak. They made a sound like dry reeds drawn across a frozen lake, a long and scraping keen that set Maren's teeth on edge.
"Rowan," Thessaly said.
Rowan drew his sword with the clean, practiced motion of a man who had been doing it since childhood. The blade was good Vael steel, well-oiled, with a simple crossguard and a pommel in the shape of a running hound. He stepped forward to put himself between the creatures and the rest of the party.
Maren fumbled for the knife at her belt. It was a healer's knife, meant for cutting poultices and splitting roots, with a thin blade and a bone handle worn smooth by years of use. She had never used it against anything more dangerous than an angry badger. Her hands were steady, though. They had been steady since Hollowfen, since the night she had walked into the council chamber and said what needed to be said and watched three elders go pale with fury.
Thessaly raised her staff. The wood at its tip began to pulse with a faint, greenish light, the color of pond scum and old copper. She began to speak in a low, rhythmic voice, words in a language Maren did not recognize, syllables that pressed against the inner ear like the memory of a dream.
The first wraith lunged.
It moved faster than it had any right to. One moment it was a dozen paces away, and the next it was on top of Rowan, its formless arms reaching for his throat. Rowan met it with a sideways slash that should have cut it cleanly in two. The blade passed through the shape with no resistance at all, as though slicing fog. The wraith's trailing edge brushed Rowan's shoulder, and he staggered, gasping, his face going the color of tallow.
"Swords don't bite them," Thessaly said, her voice strained. "Rowan, fall back. Maren, take the powder from my belt pouch, the green one, and throw it at the nearest one. It will slow them, nothing more."
Rowan retreated a step, his breath coming in harsh, shallow pulls. The place on his shoulder where the wraith had touched him was already darkening, as though a bruise were spreading beneath his skin.
Maren's fingers found Thessaly's belt pouch. The green powder inside was coarse and bit faintly of sulfur and dried toad. She hurled a handful at the nearest wraith. The powder struck the shape's center and blossomed into a small, acrid cloud. The wraith recoiled, its outline flickering like a candle flame in wind, but it did not stop. It turned toward Maren.
Maren threw the rest of the powder. The second cloud bloomed, thicker this time, and the wraith slowed, its movements becoming jerky and uncertain, but it kept coming.
"This will not hold them," Thessaly said. There was no panic in her voice, only a grim assessment of facts. "They have been here too long. The bridge feeds them."
Kael stepped forward.
He moved with a dancer's grace, his dark coat flaring slightly as he drew the slender blade at his hip. The weapon was unusual: a long, thin dagger rather than a proper sword, with a hilt wrapped in dark leather and a blade that gleamed with a faint, oily sheen. Maren had wondered about that blade on the first day of travel. She had wondered even more when Kael had taken it out to clean it and she had seen the small, careful symbols etched into the fuller.
"Blessed iron," Kael said, as though answering a question. "Forged in the temple at Solis, blessed by the high priestess herself, and paid for with a sum I prefer not to recall."
He did not wait for the wraith to reach him. He stepped into its reach instead, moving with a surety that did not match the lazy smile on his face, and drove the blade into the center of the shape.
The wraith screamed.
The sound was nothing like the scraping keen the creatures had been making. It was high and shrill and full of a fury so raw that Maren's vision blurred at the edges. The shape writhed on the blade, its outline boiling where the blessed iron touched it, and then it came apart. It dissolved into a cloud of black vapor that stank of burning hair and old graves, and the vapor scattered on the wind and was gone.
The other six stopped their advance.
Maren saw them hesitate, their formless heads tilting in unison as they regarded Kael. The greenish light from Thessaly's staff played across their edges, throwing long, uncertain shadows across the broken stones. Maren tasted metal and ash at the back of her throat.
"You have been holding out on us," Rowan said. His voice was steady, but there was a brittleness beneath it, the brittleness of a man who has just discovered a crack in something he thought he understood. He did not lower his sword. The bruise on his shoulder was spreading, darkening the fabric of his coat.
"I have been holding many things," Kael said. He did not look at Rowan. His eyes were on the six remaining wraiths, and the smile had gone from his face. What remained was harder and more honest. "You would not have believed me if I had told you."
"You could have tried."
"I could have. I chose not to."
The largest of the wraiths, the one that had first peeled from the shadow beneath the arch, drifted forward. It moved with a horrible deliberation, as though testing the air ahead of it for the scent of iron. Its edges flickered and boiled where the last of Thessaly's green powder still hung in the air.
"You will not be enough," Thessaly said. She was watching Kael's blade. The faint symbols along its fuller were glowing now, a dull red, like coals buried in ash. "There are six, and they have fed well. That one there, the largest, has been here longer than any of the others. It is older."
"Then I will be enough twice," Kael said.
He moved again. The wraith met him halfway, and the blessed iron sang through it like a hot wire through tallow. The shape came apart with another shriek that set the loose parapet stones rattling, and the vapor that boiled from it was darker than the first, shot through with veins of deep, arterial red. The smell of it reached Maren a moment later: iron and bile and the faint, sweet rot of something left too long in the sun.
Four left.
Thessaly's chanting had changed. The greenish light at her staff's tip had deepened to a muddy emerald, and the air around her shimmered faintly, as though heat were rising from a summer road. She was not attacking the wraiths. She was holding them at bay, slowing their movements, making them sluggish. Maren understood, with a healer's instinct, that Thessaly was spending herself. The woman's face had gone the color of old candle wax, and a thin line of blood had begun to trickle from her left nostril.
"Maren," Thessaly said, without turning. "When Kael strikes the fourth, take the powder from the red pouch and throw it at the ground between us and the bridge's far end. It will not stop them, but it will confuse them for a moment."
Maren found the red pouch. The powder inside was finer than the green, and it smelled of cinnamon and something sharper beneath, something that made her eyes water.
The third wraith lunged at him from the side. Kael spun, lost his footing on a loose stone, and went down on one knee. The wraith's trailing edge brushed his outstretched arm, and the sleeve of his dark coat blackened and crumbled where it touched. Kael did not cry out. He set his back foot, rose, and drove the blessed iron upward through the shape's center.
The fourth came for Maren.
She threw the red powder before the shape could reach her. The cloud bloomed in a wide, low arc across the stones, and the wraith blundered into it. Its outline blurred, its movements became erratic, and it turned in a slow, confused circle, as though it had forgotten where Maren was. Thessaly's chanting had risen in volume, the syllables tumbling over one another in a frantic, percussive rhythm.
Kael reached the fourth and cut it apart. The shriek this time was longer, more sustained, and it ended in a sound that was almost like a word, though a word in no language Maren knew.
Two left.
The remaining wraiths had drawn back toward the broken eastern parapet. They did not retreat. They watched, their formless heads tilted, their edges flickering in time with the pulse of Thessaly's staff.
"They are deciding," Thessaly said. Her voice was thin now, frayed at the edges. "Whether to leave or to take one of us."
"Then let us give them something to remember," Kael said.
He stepped toward them, the blessed iron glowing brighter with each step, and the two remaining wraiths peeled away from the parapet and drifted backward, away from him, away from the powder, away from the chanting. They passed over the bridge's far edge and were swallowed by the shadows of the ravine. The scraping keen faded, then died, and the wind from below lost its cold edge.
For a long moment no one moved.
Then Thessaly's staff slipped from her fingers. She caught herself on one knee, her breath coming in short, sharp pulls, and the line of blood from her nostril had traced a dark path to the corner of her mouth.
Rowan lowered his sword. The bruise on his shoulder had spread to the collar of his coat, and the fabric there was stiff with something dark.
"Show me," he said to Kael. His voice was level. His eyes were not.
Kael cleaned the blade of the blessed dagger on the hem of his coat, then sheathed it. The symbols along the fuller had gone dark, and the metal looked like any other metal.
"There is nothing to show," Kael said. "A blade, forged in a temple, paid for in coin I did not have at the time."
"You lied to me."
"I withheld information." Kael's smile returned, smaller now, more worn. "There is a difference. You would not have let me come if you had known what I carried."
Rowan said nothing for a long time. Then he turned to Maren.
"How is Thessaly?"
Maren knelt beside the witch. Thessaly's pulse was rapid and thready beneath her fingers, and the skin of her wrist was cool and dry.
"She has spent too much," Maren said. "She needs rest, and water, and a quiet place."
"We cannot rest here," Kael said. "The wraiths will return, or worse will come to feed on what they have left."
"Then we move," Rowan said. "Slowly."
Maren helped the witch to her feet. Thessaly leaned on her heavily, and Maren felt the tremor running through the older woman's frame, the fine, persistent shiver of a body pushed past its limit. Thessaly's staff lay where it had fallen, and Rowan picked it up without being asked and carried it at his side.
They crossed the bridge in silence. Maren did not count the steps this time. She watched the shadows at the broken parapet instead, and the place where the twisted tree reached out over the void, and the place where the largest of the wraiths had first peeled itself from the dark.
She tasted copper at the back of her throat. She did not swallow it. She let it sit there, a small, sharp weight, while the road ahead of her wound up out of the ravine and into the last of the dusk light.
The forest on the far side of the bridge was older and quieter than the pines they had left behind. The trees here were ash and rowan, their trunks pale as bone, their leaves still and dark against the rising stars. The road underfoot was carpeted in last autumn's rot, soft and soundless, and the air smelled of cold water and old leaves and the faint, sweet decay of mushrooms fattening in the dark.
Maren walked at the rear of the little column, one hand on Thessaly's arm, the other on the strap of her satchel. The witch had recovered enough to put her feet down in something like rhythm, but she leaned on Maren at every third step, and her breath came in shallow pulls that Maren did not like the sound of.
Rowan walked ahead, Kael's stolen staff held across his body like a quarterstaff. His shoulders were level. His stride ate the road. He did not look back.
They had not gone a quarter mile when Kael stopped.
"Hold."
The word was soft, almost courteous, and it cut through the forest quiet like a knife drawn from a sheath. Rowan halted at once, his weight settling, his grip shifting on the staff. Maren felt Thessaly stiffen against her.
"I hear it," Rowan said.
Maren listened. At first she heard only the forest, the small sounds of a woodland settling into its own darkness, the rustle of something small going to ground in the leaf litter, the distant complaint of a crow disturbed from its roost. Then, beneath those small and honest noises, she heard another. Hooves. Many hooves, moving at a pace that was not a walk. Not yet a gallop, but the canter that comes just before.
"Six," Kael said. "Perhaps eight."
"How far?"
"A mile. Less."
Thessaly's hand tightened on Maren's wrist.
"Can you veil us?" Maren asked her. "Even a small one?"
The witch's breath caught. "I can try. I cannot promise."
"Do not promise," Kael said, turning. His eyes were calm. "Promise is a luxury we cannot afford. Do it or do not. We will adjust."
Thessaly closed her eyes. Maren watched the color drain from her face, watched the lines around her mouth deepen and the tendons of her neck stand out like cords. The air around them thinned and cooled. The shadows under the nearest trees deepened and spread, as if the dusk itself had leaned closer to listen. Maren felt the hairs rise along her forearms, felt the small, dry prickle of magic drawn taut over her skin.
Thessaly swayed. Maren caught her.
"Hold," Maren whispered. "Hold, hold."
The witch held. The veil settled over them like a second skin, translucent and cold, and the world beyond it took on the soft, slightly blurred quality of a picture seen through water. Maren could still see the road, the trees, the pale trunks. She could no longer feel the wind.
The hooves grew louder. Lanterns bloomed in the dark between the trunks, amber and wavering, and then the riders came, eight of them as Kael had guessed, moving in a loose column of twos. They wore no colors that Maren could make out. Their cloaks were dark and their horses were dark and the lanterns were hooded to throw their light only downward, onto the path. They passed within twenty yards of where Maren stood, close enough that she could hear the creak of saddle leather and the low, private mutter of a man cursing his horse for stepping on a root.
One of the riders lifted his lantern and swung it toward the trees at the side of the road. The light passed over the place where Maren and Thessaly and Rowan stood, and Maren held her breath until her chest ached, and the lantern swung back, and the column moved on.
They waited. The hoofbeats faded. The amber glow thinned and vanished between the trunks. The forest settled back into its own quiet, and the veil thinned, and Thessaly let out a long, shaking breath and sat down abruptly in the middle of the road.
"Seven," Kael said. "I miscounted. There were seven."
"That is not helpful," Maren said.
"It is accurate. Accuracy is a habit."
Thessaly was shaking badly now, the fine persistent shiver of the bridge grown into something coarser and less controllable. Maren knelt beside her and pulled the stopper from her waterskin and put it to the witch's lips.
"Small sips."
"I know," Thessaly said. "I have done this before."
"Have you done it seven times in one night?"
Thessaly drank. The water ran from the corner of her mouth and she did not wipe it. Her eyes were closed.
"The riders," Rowan said. He had not moved from his position at the front of the column. His voice was low and even. "Did you recognize them?"
"No," Kael said.
"They were not Ashward."
"No."
"Ashward do not ride in columns of twos. They ride alone or in pairs, and they do not carry hooded lanterns."
"Correct."
"So who were they?"
Kael was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Men who have been told to bring back something, or someone, and who would prefer not to be seen doing it."
Rowan's grip on the staff shifted. Maren saw the motion in her peripheral vision, the small white-knuckled adjustment of a man whose patience had run out some time ago and who was now operating on the cold, clear fuel that comes after.
"Did your father send them?"
"I do not know."
"You do not know, or you will not say?"
Kael turned and looked at him. In the last of the dusk, his face was all planes and shadows, and his eyes were very steady.
"I do not know," he said. "And I am telling you this in front of your healer so that you will believe it is true. I have not had word from the capital in eleven days. My last instructions were to find the witch and to find the book and to bring them both back. I have done neither. If my father has sent others, they were sent without my knowledge, and I cannot predict their orders or their behavior."
Rowan studied him for a long moment. Maren watched the two men across Thessaly's bowed head, and she thought of two dogs who had once slept in the same basket and who now circled each other at a careful distance, measuring.
"We move," Rowan said at last. "We find water. We find shelter. We bind what needs binding. In the morning, we decide what to do about the men on the road."
"And about my father?" Kael said.
"In the morning," Rowan said.
Thessaly slept for a little while as they walked. Maren bore as much of her weight as she could, and Rowan took the other side without being asked, his arm around the witch's waist, the stolen staff tucked under his elbow. The witch's head lolled between them. Her breath came and went, slow and even, and the color slowly returned to her face in the way of a banked fire fanned back to life.
They found a stream an hour before dawn. It ran shallow and clear over a bed of pale pebbles, and the sound of it, when they first heard it through the trees, was so ordinary and so welcome that Maren felt her eyes sting.
Rowan filled the waterskins. Maren washed Thessaly's face and wrists and the back of her neck with the cold water, and the witch made a small, protesting sound and opened her eyes.
"We are still moving," Thessaly said.
"We are stopped."
"Then why do I feel the road under me?"
"Because your body remembers it." Maren dipped the cloth again. "The stream is good. The water is cold and clean. Drink."
Thessaly drank. Then she looked past Maren's shoulder, and her face changed.
"What is that?"
Maren turned. Kael stood at the edge of the stream, his boots in the water, his head bowed, and he was very still in the way of a man who is listening to something no one else can hear. In his right hand he held a small knife, blade down, and he was turning it slowly between his fingers in a way that Maren recognized from village healers who had once been soldiers. A habit of the hand, kept long after the reason for it had passed.
Rowan came to stand beside Maren. He did not speak. He watched.
"He's thinking," Maren said, low.
"He is calculating," Rowan said. "There is a difference."
"And what is the difference, my lord captain?"
"One is a luxury. The other is a habit."
Maren looked at him. For a moment, in the grey pre-dawn light, his face was very young, and very tired, and she saw in it the boy he must have been before the throne and the guard and the missing brother had grown up around him like a forest around a sapling.
"You should sleep," she said.
"So should you."
"I will, when she is steady."
"And not before."
"No."
He nodded. He went back to filling the waterskins.
Kael came up from the stream with his boots wet and his face composed. He sheathed the knife at his belt and crouched beside Thessaly and held out his hand.
"May I see your wrist?"
The witch hesitated. Then she put her hand in his. He turned it over, pressed his thumb to the pulse, counted.
"Slower," he said. "Stronger."
"Did you expect otherwise?" Thessaly said, with a thin edge of humor.
"I expected you to be dead by midnight. You have disappointed me twice now. I am beginning to form a habit."
Thessaly withdrew her hand. "Do not. Forming habits about me is what kills people."
Kael inclined his head, as if she had paid him a compliment.
The sky was beginning to lighten at the eastern edge of the trees. Maren felt the shift in the air, the slow withdrawal of the night's particular cold, and she stood and stretched and looked about her for the first time as if she might actually stay in one place for a while.
The clearing by the stream was small and sheltered. A fallen oak made a natural bench. The ash trees above them were thick enough to break the sight of anyone on the road. The water was close enough to be useful and far enough not to drown in if the rains came.
"We stop here," she said. "Two hours. No more. She needs the rest, and so do we, and pushing her further before dawn is finished will cost more than we can afford."
Rowan looked at Kael. Kael looked at the road.
"Two hours," Kael said.
Rowan set the staff against the fallen oak and unbuckled his sword belt and laid it across his knees. He did not take off the sword. He sat with his back against the bark and his hands on the pommel, and he closed his eyes.
Kael took the far side of the clearing, where a thicket of hazel made a natural screen. He sat with his back to a stone and his knife across his knees, and he did not close his eyes.
Thessaly slept. Maren sat beside her, the satchel in her lap, her fingers resting on the latch. The book was quiet. She could feel it through the leather, a small, contained hum, like a cat purring in its sleep.
The dawn came. The light touched the tops of the ash trees first, then the trunks, then the leaf litter at their feet. The stream caught it and threw it back, broken and bright. A blackbird began to sing from somewhere high above them, a slow, deliberate song, and another answered it from across the clearing, and the two traded phrases back and forth as if they had all the time in the world.
Maren listened. The copper taste at the back of her throat had faded. In its place was the mineral cold of the stream water she had been breathing for the last hour, and beneath that, the faint, clean smell of wet ash wood.
Thessaly's hand moved in her sleep, found Maren's wrist, and held it.
Maren held still. She watched the light move down the trees. She watched the road through the screen of hazel where Kael sat motionless, his eyes open, his knife across his knees. She watched Rowan's shoulders, level and slow, the breath of a man who had learned to sleep sitting up because the world he lived in did not permit the luxury of a bed.
She thought of the riders in the dark, the hooded lanterns, the men who had been sent to bring something back and who would prefer not to be seen doing it.
She thought of Kael's knife turning between his fingers, and of the boy's face she had seen in Rowan's, and of the witch's hand holding her wrist like a child holding a corner of its mother's cloak.
She thought of the book in her lap, quiet and warm, waiting.
She did not sleep. She watched the dawn come all the way down.
The morning found them in a saddle between two low hills, where the road dipped through a stand of rowan trees and the wind off the moor came in long, shuddering waves that flattened the bracken and made the ponies stamp and roll their eyes. Maren had walked ahead to find water and came back with the news that there was none, only a brackish trickle over red stone that tasted of iron and old leaves. Kael drank from it anyway, cupping his hands, making a face. Rowan did not drink. He sat his horse and watched the road behind them with the patience of a man who had learned that what came from behind was more often fatal than what lay ahead.
They rode in silence for an hour. The moor opened around them in folds of brown and purple, the heather still in bloom in the sheltered places, gone to rust and seed on the high ground. A hawk hung over them for a time, riding the same wind, and Maren watched it the way she watched everything now, with the dull, exhausted attention of a body running out of the reserves it had borrowed from fear.
Thessaly dozed in the saddle. Her hands were folded on the pommel. She looked, in the flat morning light, like a woman who had simply decided to rest for a moment and would go on resting until someone made her stop. Only the faint movement of her fingers, turning the ring slowly around and around, showed that she was still in there somewhere, still listening to whatever she listened to.
Midmorning brought the salt bridge.
Maren smelled it before she saw it, a sharp, clean reek of brine carried on a wind that should not have come from that quarter. Then the road dipped and the moor broke apart around a deep cleft, and across the cleft was a bridge of grey stone, old enough that the parapets had crumbled into heaps of rubble, and set into the road at the far end was a figure on a grey horse, waiting.
Not moving. Not signalling. Just waiting, the way a hinge waits for the door to swing on it.
Rowan reined in. Kael, a length behind, did the same.
The figure did not approach. The wind off the moor tore at the cloak, and beneath it, as the fabric snapped sideways for a moment, Maren caught the glint of mail.
Kael's voice came low and pleasant from behind her, as if they were discussing the merits of a wine. "Captain. Is that who I think it is?"
Rowan did not answer at once. He was reading the shape of the figure, the way the cloak sat on the shoulders, the angle of the head. "If it is," he said at last, "we are in more trouble than I had hoped."
Maren looked at the bridge. The stone of it was pale, almost white in the sun, and the mortar between the blocks was crusted with a faint, greasy sheen that caught the light. She thought of the note in the book, the careful lines, the words about salt and iron and what was owed. She thought of the witch at the white oak, waiting with her patient, terrible smile.
The figure on the far side of the bridge lifted one hand. Not in greeting. In warning. Then the hand dropped, and the figure turned the grey horse with a movement so precise it looked rehearsed, and walked it off the road into the heather, and was gone.
Rowan exhaled. Kael made a small, appreciative sound.
"Well," said Kael. "That was dramatic."
"That was my father's Master of the Salt Bridge," said Rowan. "His name is Edric. He does not ride out for weather."
"And yet here he is, riding out for us."
"For what follows us," said Rowan. "Or for what we carry."
Maren looked at Thessaly. The old woman had not moved. Her hands were still folded on the pommel, the ring still turning, and her eyes were open now but aimed at nothing, at the middle distance where whatever she saw was not on this moor.
They crossed the bridge at a walk. The stone rang under the hooves like a struck bell, a low, singing note that Maren felt in the roots of her teeth. She kept her hand on the pommel of her own saddle and her eyes on the parapet, where the crumbled stone lay in drifts of pale grit that moved in the wind like sand. Halfway across, the pony threw its head up and would not go forward, and Maren had to dismount and lead it by the bridle, feeling the bridge shudder under her boots with each step.
On the far side, the moor resumed its long, empty sweep. There was no sign of Edric or the grey horse. There was only the wind, and the heather, and the pale shape of the bridge behind them already beginning to blur into the colour of the sky.
They made camp that night in a hollow between two rises, where a shelf of rock gave some shelter from the wind and a thicket of stunted hawthorn hid their fire from the road. Rowan built the fire low, more for the look of it than the warmth, and set Kael on the high ground with a clear sightline east and south. Maren made a thin soup from the last of the dried meat and some of the bitter roots she had pulled from the bank of the stream, and Thessaly sat beside the fire with the book open on her knees and did not speak.
It was Kael who came down off the hill at moonrise, moving quietly enough that Maren did not hear him until he was already stepping over the low stones at the edge of the firelight. He had his knife in his hand. He sat down across from Maren and began to clean his fingernails with the point of it, and he did not look at her.
"Where is the captain?" he asked, as if making conversation.
Maren nodded toward the dark beyond the fire, where Rowan had gone to check the horses. "Where he is every night."
"And our sleeping beauty?"
"Asleep."
"For which mercy," said Kael, "we owe whatever gods are still awake."
Maren said nothing. She watched the knife turn in his fingers, the same slow, turning motion she had seen the night before, and she thought of the boy at the spring, his face in the lantern light, and of the man across the fire, and of the gap between them that was wide enough to ride a horse through and that no one would ever close.
"You should sleep," said Kael, still not looking at her. "The road will be harder tomorrow."
"So I am told."
"It is not advice I offer lightly." He slid the knife back into his belt. "I find I am invested in your continued well-being. It is an odd sensation. I had thought myself past it."
Maren looked at him. The firelight put copper into his hair and softened the lines of his face, and for a moment, in the play of light and shadow, he looked like the boy he must have been before the Ashward and the politics and the slow, patient work of becoming the kind of man who could send riders into the dark with hooded lanterns and not lose a moment's sleep.
"I do not trust you," she said.
"No," he agreed. "You would be a fool to."
"Then why tell me."
"Because you should know that whatever else I am, I am not careless with the people in my charge." He paused. "Even the ones I did not choose."
He got up, brushed the dirt from his knees, and went back up the hill. Maren watched him go until the dark took him.
Rowan came in from the horses with a bucket of stream water and set it by the fire. He had a scratch across the back of one hand where a bramble had caught him, and a deeper set to his shoulders than when they had started the day. He crouched beside the fire and washed the scratch without speaking, and Maren moved to tend it, and he let her, and the two of them worked in silence for a while, the way you work with someone you have known long enough that speech becomes a thing you choose rather than a thing you must.
She was wrapping the last of the bandage when he said, very quietly, "Tomorrow we come to the moorlands."
"I know."
"There is a woman there. A witch, if you believe the stories. I do not, but I have seen her work, and I will not gainsay the stories to her face."
Maren waited.
"She is old. Older than Thessaly, which is saying something. She has been on that moor since before I was born, and she will be there when I am dust. My father has tried, twice in my lifetime, to bring her in. Both times he failed. Both times he lost men he could not spare."
"She sounds dangerous."
"She sounds like a woman who will not be brought in," said Rowan. "There is a difference."
"And you want us to go to her."
"I want us to go somewhere my father's men will not follow, and she is the only door on this road that is not watched."
He looked at the fire. The flames had died down to a low, red bed of coals that gave off more heat than light, and in that light his face looked older than his years, the lines of command and caution already settling into the skin.
"Kael thinks we should press on," he said. "He thinks the witch is a liability, and that the further we are from her door when the Ashward catches up, the better."
"And you?"
"I think Kael is wrong."
Maren tied off the bandage. She did not look up.
"Why?"
Rowan was quiet for a long time. The coals ticked and shifted. Somewhere on the hill, Kael's boots scraped against stone as he changed position.
"Because Thessaly knows her," he said at last. "And because the book in her lap has her hand in it, and I have learned, in a short and brutal education, that the things in that book are not to be ignored."
"You could be wrong."
"I could. I have been before."
"And if you are wrong, and we go to her, and she is what Kael says, what then?"
Rowan looked at her. The red light was in his eyes, and in his eyes there was something she had not seen in them before, something that was neither the captain nor the heir nor the boy at the spring, but a man sitting in the dark with a dying fire, making a decision that might end in his own death and the death of everyone with him, and making it anyway because the other road was worse.
"Then we die," he said, "having chosen the door we did not understand. Which is, I am beginning to think, the only kind of door there is."
Maren held his gaze. She thought of the boy at the spring, his face in the lantern light, and of the man across the fire, and of the woman on the moor with her patient, terrible smile, and of the book in Thessaly's lap that waited and waited and did not judge.
"Then we go to her," she said.